“Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent.” ~Napoleon Bonaparte

I’ve been out of the loop for a while now, and I’ve been happy. I’ve actually felt like a good father to my children and stopped thinking that my whole family and livelihood are fucked because I still don’t have a book deal. My friend Brandon told me something awesome the other day. He said, in regards to FUTUREPROOF not being picked up by a traditional publisher, “A Prophet is rarely heeded in his own land.” Am I saying that I agree with Brando’s assessment of my being a prophet, that I hold great and powerful insight into the world and the human condition? Well–my humility, inherent Jewish sense of guilt, and lack of balls large enough to facilitate such a claim force me to tell you no, I don’t believe that I am a prophet. But I do believe, especially in light of happenings of the past few weeks, that I have a voice that speaks for a lot of people, and I have been very lax in using that voice to its fullest potential.

See, I have been focusing all my efforts on getting FUTUREPROOF properly published. But all along the answer to finding an exceptional community of readers has been right at my fingertips. I’ve sold less than a thousand, more than 500 copies of my book with literally no publicity budget, no way of getting the book noticed, and that means that there are a shitload of people who are still out there and have no clue that FUTUREPROOF exists. Far more important than that, there are thousands upon thousands of us out there who feel the isolation and desperation that is the basis for my book. But we are powerless until we find each other and unite. So what I’d like to do is start a community, with the inception on my myspace page, of people who feel the same way about our increasingly fucked up world. Tell me what you think about the state of things, how you feel about your place in it, what you’d like to do to try to facilitate change. Here’s the first response I’ve gotten on this topic, which was spawned by a conversation in my chatroom at http://www.futureproofbook.com. These comments were made by Charlene. Add comments as you see fit.

Talk soon.

~NFD

P.S. I’ll be chatting more often than ever now, at least once a week. This week it’ll be Thursday afternoon from 1-4 p.m. EST.

Lack of Legitimate Authority *NB – I use the terms us and them here… but it is mostly only a rhetorical function… I don’t actually think the division is so clear and that there even is a “them” per se.

The main thing that makes us different from everybody else is a complete and utter disregard and contempt for the values that we have been told that we are supposed to have. What drives this contempt is the need and desire to be free… free like they tell us we can be free, but that they don’t really want us to be.

We see through the shit… we see how they manipulate to their own agenda… we see how our lives are merely just cogs in the machine, and we’re bitter about it.

We think that paying bills is a pain in the ass and don’t think that our hard earned money should be going to pay for the new yachts and hummers of the CEOs of multinational banks and corporations… we want the yachts and the hummers for ourselves.

We don’t fall for the advertising, we criticize it.

BUT We are so fucked up because we NEED a set of beliefs to live by, but those beliefs have been so fragmented by personalized media and the incessant influx of new information that we cannot agree on a coherent set of beliefs.

This is to the benefit of the so-called establishment… to keep us fragmented means that we will stay paralysed. We will consume the video games and reality TV, because when we stop to think about the state of the world, we just want to either (a) curl up in the fetal position and cry or (b) hit somebody

The lack of a coherent generational value system means that we will never be able to get our shit together to ever form a viable opposition.

That’s why the Internet is so threatening… why there is such a big political push to regulate and monitor… it isn’t all islamic fundamentalists they are looking for. Though I don’t always like saying things like this too loud… you never know who is listening.